1) utilitarianism is absolutely not the same as "reason". Its one of several ethical theories, and it isn't without its fair share of problems.

2) right now self driving cars are more deadly than human drivers by several orders of magnitude. Thats the reality.

Are you joking or is there a study I missed? You have seen statistics for accidents and fatalities when human drovers are involved, yes?

Right now, per mile, self-driving cars are much less safe than humans. As has been noted before though, we don't have that many miles of data on self-driving cars, and the tech is still quite young and there's (probably) a lot of room for improvement.

Not all self driving car programs were created equal. Tesla and Uber have been acting like cowboys from the start. Most of the advanced lane keeping type setups GM supercruise and Nissan Propilot are exposed to similar risk as Autopilot, but excepting the gong show that is Uber, all the other companies developing L4 have a pretty stellar track record.

And, as you mentioned, we need to accumulate billions of test miles before we'll have statistically comprehensive data.

You can't compare statistics unless the underlying miles are comparable, though. The only miles that humans drive which should be compared are those that a given AI is capable of driving.

The fatality rate for human drivers is 1 death per 141 million km driven (US only, many other industrialized countries are significantly better)[1]

There are currently at least 4 confirmed deaths from autonomous vehicles[2]. While beat is correct in stating that those are not enough deaths to draw reliable conclusions from (and Model S owners are not like the average driver), there would have to be more than 600 million km driven autonomously to be comparable to the death rate of normal cars. Probably significantly more, as the cohort of human drivers that is equivalent to Model S owners is way less often involved in accidents in the first place.

[1] = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

[2] = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_autonomous_car_fatalit...

1. I know what utilitarianism is, and its shortcomings. Do you know what humor is?

2. You're misusing statistics. There isn't enough data on autonomous driving performance to make your claim, not enough road miles.

So we agree that there is no empirical base for the assumption that self driving cars really save lives?

Only if we're separating empirical evidence from inferential evidence.

We can't demonstrate empirically, because there is far too little data at this point (and refusing to do the thing to collect the data because we don't have enough data is not a sound moral argument).

But we can infer a great deal. And I've already established grounds for inference...

- Better sensors. Sensors that can detect 360 degrees at all times, and see into infrared, not to mention LIDAR. The sensors can easily outperform human eyes attached to human heads. - Better mechanics. Automation can be directly connected to steering and brakes, as opposed to modulating through human hands and feet and into other mechanical linkages. - Better reflexes. Less lag from observation to action, compared to the eyes/brain/hands system. - No distraction. Human minds wander. - No intoxication. - No sleeping! Falling asleep at the wheel causes many fatal accidents. - No emotions, no anger, no aggression.

So emotionally and mechanically, autonomous systems are clearly superior to humans. The only real argument left is interpretation of the environment. Can they detect hazards more effectively than humans can? Let's look at some hazard categories...

Lane drift - easily solved. Running red lights and stop signs - easily solved. Speeding - easily solved. Maintaining braking distance in traffic - easily solved.

I could go through more, but you get the idea. We're focusing on "What if a pedestrian steps out in front of it and it doesn't recognize them as a hazard?", and ignoring much more common categories of accident-causing situations, categories where machines easily outperform humans.

So "empirical base"? Sure, no basis. But inferentially, the argument for the superiority of autonomous driving systems is very strong.

You're severely armchair architecting here. What happens if sensors fail? How often do sensors need to be replaced? Do sensors behave well under inclement weather conditions (snow is a common source of glare). What if an emergency vehicle flashes their sirens and floods the street with light? There's a lot we don't know, and while there may be satisfying solutions to these problems, we're not there yet. In the meantime, subjecting humans to this insanity due to some "inferential evidence" that doesn't hold water is highly reckless.

Your argument is "Sensors are better than humans!", and that's a non-argument, inferential or otherwise.

I once had a retinal vein occlusion (basically, a stroke in my retina) while driving. I recognized that my vision had deteriorated and got off the road. Humans have heart attacks, strokes, seizures, and other systemic failures while driving, too.

Detecting sensor failure is child's play. We have over a half-century of experience at detecting and handling sensor failures in computer systems. Hell, I left the gas cap off my car once, and every idiot light in the car flipped out on me. Cruise control stopped working. Etc.

Detecting glare, flashing lights, and other visual interference is likewise well-established technology. And how does the autonomous car respond? By slowing down, staying within safe parameters. Meanwhile, one of the most common causes of fatal accidents is humans driving too fast for conditions, often due to poor visibility. I trust the self-driving car more than the human driver for that.

Do you seriously think that the much qualified software engineers and other specialists working on these projects are not thinking through all these points?

There's a lot of problems we don't know the solutions to, but that certainly does not mean that these teams don't know the solutions either.

> Do you seriously think that the much qualified software engineers and other specialists working on these projects are not thinking through all these points?

You are commenting in a thread about how a team of those "much qualified software engineers and other specialists" failed to do simulation testing. So yes, there is reason to believe that these companies are failing to address many of these potential problems.

I know a lot of people working in the space who know very well what (some of) the problems are -- but are unable to do anything about it because of organisational politics. :-(

We do have data on accidents and human interventions preventing accidents. It just points towards current generation self driving technology being much less safe than the average human driver. Selectively listing things which technology (often fairly simple technology like cruise control which doesn't pretend to have the intelligence to drive your car) is better at than humans doesn't change that, particularly not when it is easy to draw a similar arbitrary list of things which technology is inferior to humans and far from evident that it might catch up in the foreseeable future.

Even if "current generation self driving technology [is] much less safe than the average human driver" - which I will grant is a possibility, although I'm not convinced - that does not at all imply that it is "far from evident that it might catch up in the foreseeable future".

I believe the evidence strongly suggests that autonomous driving will not only catch up, but greatly exceed human drivers in the foreseeable future. Mechanically, automation is superior to humans for simply operating the car. And the large categories of causes for fatal accidents are low-hanging fruit for automation - lane drift, running red lights, driving too fast for conditions, etc. And sensors can observe the environment as well as or better than eyeballs.

The only real point of contention is in interpreting unexpected hazards, like the infamous bicyclist. But interpreting sensor input is subject to continuous improvement, due to programmer experience, log data, and Moore's Law. So even if that point is weak now, there's no reason to believe it will not improve substantially - in fact, it is unreasonable to believe that it will not improve.

It is unreasonable to believe the current technology will not improve in any way. It is also unreasonable to expect people to accept an increased chance of death resulting from relaxation of test safety guidelines because some futurists have essentially blind faith that exponential curves will prevail over diminishing returns in the very near future.

Large categories of potential causes for fatal accidents are things which humans very seldom have issues with but computer programs often struggle with like inferring intent and identifying whether something is animate, which can easily cancel out reductions in other types of accident due to (e.g.) better average lane discipline. Especially when you consider the benchmark for fatalities per billion km driven is around 3.5[1] including fatalities caused by humans considered unfit to drive, and humans who are considerably less experienced and safety-conscious than the likely early adopters of SDVs. SDVs have already had one fatality and several incidents where human intervention prevented accidents in a few million miles of low speed, good condition driving. I think we're a very long way from seeing any indication computers alone will ever beat that benchmark, still less a plausible case that the additional deaths resulting from riskier testing programmes will be cancelled out by lives saved if the first few SDV models go on sale a few months earlier.

[1]a few European countries; it's double that in the US, which also suggests that if you want to reduce road deaths there's a lot of other steps that can be taken which don't involve risky technology experiments.

So what we're debating is when, rather than if. You seem to accept that, someday, this technology will be superior to human drivers in the general case. But how will we know, without testing in real-world conditions? At what point do we start saying a given program is safe enough to test on actual roads, not just simulations or closed courses?

The alternative is to simply never allow it at all, to assume that humans will always be better drivers than computers. Which opens up an ethical dilemma. If auto-autos could save tens of thousands of lives a year - and it seems at least plausible that it could happen - then to reject it out of hand is to cause tens of thousands of innocent deaths a year.

Inferential evidence, aka magical thinking!

2. How are you claiming that they are safer than driving as is then?

Rather than magical thinking people will use voting to either ban or very heavily regulate self driving car companies.

Now that, I agree with. Their reasoning may be unsound, but politics isn't always about reason.

As they should, given that self driving tech is orders of magnitude less safe and leads to fatalities.